U.S. Pat. No. 5,534,851 discloses a known alarm system for notifying necessary medical and hospital personnel that a patient or the patient's life support equipment require immediate response without providing the alarm signal to the monitored patient or surrounding patients.
An alarm signal pulse generator takes the status output signal from a medical equipment monitor sensor and converts that signal into a coded pulse that identifies the patient, the room, the ambulance or other relevant location information. The output of the alarm signal pulse generator is communicated to a master alarm control. The master control includes an antenna to simultaneously transmit a signal to an appropriate group of pagers.
Using a keyboard a user inputs the names of hospital staff assigned to each patient, to each room, and to each type of medical condition as well as the availability of those individuals to respond to emergency calls.
The master alarm control transmits an RF signal to a plurality of pagers. The transmitted signals from the master control unit may be coded in such a way that only particular pagers held by certain personnel would be activated, e.g., the technicians that deal strictly with ventilators may have a certain code that would not disturb other personnel within a given area.